Monday, June 4, 2007

Nicholas Stix explained?

At the risk of boring some of you, I have to say I’m intrigued by Nicholas Stix, the Internet journalist who still… still!… believes “Yacub 7 Ali” and his cult of Negro Sun Worshippers actually exist.

Stix is the only quasi-legitimate writer to have spread the notion that there’s a group of blacks on the Web actually celebrating the vicious rape-murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom in Knoxville.

I may have discovered the reason why.

Blacks used to bully him as a kid.

Before I get into that, let me share some good news. The folks in charge at Blogcritics.org – a grassroots-media website that draws as many as 80,000 unique visitors in a day – removed a few paragraphs from Nick Stix’s May 29 article on the “Knoxville Horror.”

Stix originally wrote: “Some black supremacist activists have… publicly expressed their love for [the accused murderers].” He cited Internet comments posted by “one of the contributors to the black supremacist Web site, Svengali Media, which celebrates all black-on-white racist atrocities, and has cheered the rapes, tortures, and murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom…”

Here, now, is the “editor’s note” attached to Stix’s story:

“Some material in this article which discussed the site Svengali Media has been removed. It was not essential to the main points of the article and functioned as a distraction because of the questionable nature of the site and the material contained on it. …”

I had sent an email to Blogcritics publisher Eric Olsen and his political editors last Tuesday, explaining that Svengali Media is not a genuine black website. It labels itself, on one webpage, “cynical humor, more offensive than amusing.”

As Dave Nalle, a Blogcritics editor, wrote in a blog comment last Tuesday: “My first assumption when I saw the site was that it was a highly developed sarcastic parody of some sort…”

If Svengali Media seemed fishy to Dave Nalle, and seemed fishy to me, and seemed fishy to those on various Internet discussion boards where the hoaxster has trolled (such as this one)… why didn’t it seem fishy to Nicholas Stix?

In response to my email, Stix wrote to Eric Olsen that the Svengali Media site “has the distinct flavor of black supremacism, as I have known it… firsthand since childhood…”

Since childhood? What does that mean?

Nicholas Stix is in his late 40s. He grew up in Long Beach, N.Y. – a largely white town in Nassau County – in the same neighborhood Billy Crystal grew up in. So where did he learn of “black supremacism”? Perhaps the answer can be found in a piece Stix posted on August 22, 2001.

As a prelude to his discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Stix shared a recollection of his youth. A youth during which “almost every day meant a fight.”

Stix doesn’t say that his bullies were black. But now that he has made an issue of his childhood experience with “black supremacism,” we can assume they were.

If only Mr. Stix would write directly of the racial bullying he endured. Maybe we could all learn something from that. (I’m sure he’s not the only one who could tell such stories.)

What Nick Stix should quit doing is believing everything he reads on the intertubes. And spreading made-up horseshit about a “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition.”

So here’s what he wrote in 2001:

NICHOLAS STIX: “Arthur, you’re going to have to stop messing with my family,” I said, standing in Arthur Harris’ doorway. Arthur said, “Wait a second,” and went back inside his apartment. On a hunch, I went into in my apartment, a few doors down, and got my friend, “Hank Aaron.” I returned to Arthur’s doorway, where he and his friend, “Jim Bowie,” greeted us.

I didn’t tell Arthur that I was going to kill him if he tried to step across the threshold, but that’s just what I was going to do.

For thirty minutes at dinner time, we stood there. In silence. Arthur and “Jim,” and me and “Hank.”

I’d never seen such a big knife. Choke-a-horse big. And yet, after thirty minutes, Arthur agreed to call off his buddies. I then returned to our apartment, where for the next thirty minutes, every muscle in my body shook uncontrollably.

Now, I’m no Audie Murphy. I’ve always been pretty much of a coward; in combat situations, I’ve had to rely on keeping my wits. Most of the time, I’ve bluffed my way out; since I almost always had to fight much bigger, healthier opponents -- and as the last Jew in my Long Beach neighborhood, almost every day meant a fight -- I developed methods of scuffling and clutching much bigger boys to a draw.

In a poor neighborhood, if you’re a teenage boy with no man or big brother around, it’s incumbent on you to protect your mother. If necessary, you kill for her. Otherwise, your choice is to stay and die, or run and hide. (Not that my mother held that view; she was a good “liberal,” which almost got me killed on many an occasion. She has since been mugged out of the worst of her socialist excesses.)